Megan McArdle on the Complexity Bubble

Here:

...Every so often I'll read some description of a project out of the olden days--the battle against malaria in Panama, the handling of the Great Mississippi Flood, or the creation of the WPA--and just marvel at how fast everything used to be. The WPA was authorized in April of 1935. By December, it was employing 3.5 million people. The Hoover Dam took 16 years from the time it was first proposed, to completion; eight years, if you start counting from the time it passed Congress.

Contrast this with a current, comparatively trivial project: it has been seventeen years since the Southeast High Speed Rail Corridor was established by USDOT, and we should have a Record of Decision on the Tier II environmental impact statement no later than 2010. This for something that runs along existing rail rights of way, and in fact, uses currently operating track in many places.

Would we have won the Cold War if not for our technology? Technology includes the atom bomb which perhaps prevented the Red Army from sweeping across Europe after WW2, and the 1980s military upgrades which the Soviets could not afford to match.

What if the government still operated at 1930s efficiency with today's technology?

Have the parasite classes learned how to coopt technology? (For example, the thousand-page special-interest laws that Congress does not read could not even have been printed a century ago.)

Just because technological innovation saved us from decline and fall in the past, it may not necessarily do so in the future.